Beyond Stereotypes How Artists of Turkish Descent Deal with Identity in Germany

Picture a Venn diagram. There are two circles. One is labeled "Society comprised of German people from a Turkish migrant background," and the other is labeled "German mainstream society." Note that there is overlap where the two circles meet, but two distinct circles remain. Within the two circles are many smaller circles that overlap in a variety of ways. They ask questions such as, "If we are to accept a German-Turkish identity, then what does it mean to be Turkish?", and “Am I truly German if I am denied the full rights of other citizens in this country?” This diagram is intended to portray the parallel societies that have developed within Germany in response to the country's decades-long oblivion about and mishandling of their migrant population.

Immigration from Turkey to Germany began in the early 1960’s in response to the need for workers in Germany. A treaty between Germany and Turkey was established that allowed these immigrants to come to Germany as guest-workers, granting them only limited civil rights. Over the next 40 years, increasing numbers of Turkish immigrants settled in Germany, without gaining real political recognition as a part of the German society. Even today, the social and economic problems of Turkish immigrants are considered to be the problems of “the Turks, the migrants,” but are rarely addressed as social problems within the German society or as a "German problem."

The continued ostracization of Turkish immigrants in Germany, more than 40 years after significant numbers of Turkish individuals settled in the country, has created Turkish identities that are nuanced, at times polarized, and always complex. The stereotypes perpetuated about Turkish individuals living in Germany only complicate this understanding of Turkish-German identity, both from the Turkish-German perspective and from the perspective of “natively” German citizens. A few rough stereotypes of Turkish-Germans have evolved, including images of the young, tough Turkish criminal, the cloistered, oppressed Turkish woman swathed in a headscarf, and the modern, fully-assimilated, German-speaking Turk. Turkish-German filmmaker Sükriye Dönmez remarked that she began making her own films after working as an actress, in part because of the continuous typecasting of roles she received. “I played seven different parts for a Turkish woman named Aishe,” she remarked, “and in the parts I auditioned for, I was always cast as ‘the Turkish girl.’” Dönmez began producing her own short films in response to such typecasting, explaining that her reality as a Turkish-German was reality too—not just a headscarf. Such a statement points to the importance of art, the focus of this paper, as an expressive tool of individual identity.

The “torn” identity that some Turkish migrants experience in Germany is one also shared by their artists. Many German-Turkish artists refuse to tackle migration and identity issues directly, as they do not like to be pigeonholed as migrant artists limited to migrant issues. The young Turkish-German rapper Erko, for example, doesn’t want to perpetuate clichés by identifying himself as a migrant; for Erko, “Migration is just part of personal experience.” Tuncay Kulaoğlu, journalist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the “Turkey/Germany” film festival, feels that “the need to label something reflects the society’s need for the homogenization of something that is not homogenous at all. We have a lot of parallel societies, but I am fine with that (though this does not mean that I am fine with the problems arising in these societies).” Some artists, however, very much want to wrestle with these issues and use art as a platform for discussion, while others deal with these issues, if not blatantly, through the lens of personal experience that shapes every artist. Art provides an outlet to portray identity in a manner that moves beyond stereotypes and beyond the label of “migrant,” allowing instead for the portrayal of far more nuanced and realistic expressions of Turkish-German everyday experience.

Why Art?

How can one reconcile these intersections of tradition and modernity, native land and foreign land, which Turkish-Germans might encounter? How is art useful in this process? Shermin Langhoff, Director of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin, commented that “art is the only social force that doesn’t have to make compromises, whereas politics and economics always have to make compromises. Politicians have to think about getting re-elected after a legislation period, economists have to worry about benefit. Art, however, is the only societal movement which may discuss problems and issues of migration and identity without compromises. Art is not required to tackle problematic issues, but at least it has the potential to do so.” Art does not provide or even seek to provide answers, but it can be used as a tool to critique society, to challenge one’s way of thinking, and to push society forward into more progressive directions. The diverse art forms covered in this paper, ranging from film and theater to music and photography, play an important role in the individual exploration and expression of Turkish-German identity, fostering dialogue about previously taboo topics and giving a voice to those who did not possess one beforehand.

Turkish-German Hip Hop in Berlin

Turkish-German hip hop in Berlin stems from hip hop’s long tradition of being the music of social consciousness, and the music commonly utilized by marginalized communities to critique the system that governs them. Hip hop has a unique history in Germany's youth culture in its use as a tool of social criticism, and was singularly appropriated by Turkish-German youth during the 1990's. It is without doubt that Turkish-German hip hop and rap have played a significant role as a means for Turkish-German youth to express their opinions on their Turkish-German identity.

Hip hop grew out of the South Bronx in the 1970's as 'a popular medium that expressed the voices of a “‘dispossessed generation’ of Black American and Latino youth in urban America” (Caglar, 1998). This paved the way for rap and hip hop to be globally viewed as a mechanism to give a voice to generations of marginalized youth and to marginalized societies as a whole. Uniquely in Berlin during the 1990's, youth centers and local government entities played a crucial role in making hip hop popular with Turkish youth (Caglar, 1998). Turkish hip hop grew specifically out of the diaspora communities in Germany, especially in areas such as Berlin. Even early Turkish hip hop and rap easily made the connections between the history of the United States' minorities and their own situation. For example, one of the first Turkish rap groups in Germany called themselves "The White Nigger Posse."

The first Turkish hip hop album recorded in Turkish, King Size Terror's "Life of a Stranger" (BirYabancimin Hayati), created the genre of oriental hip hop. In 1995, a group of Turkish rappers and hip hop artists in Germany came together to form the group Cartel. Their stated goal was to create Turkish music, and to provide a voice speaking out against discrimination against the minority communities in Germany. Cartel brought into prominence the hybrid nature of the new Turkish culture in Germany—clearly separating it from the stereotypical "traditional" Turkish culture. In one of their most famous songs "You are a Turk," Cartel poignantly reflects the frustrations of being Turkish in Germany and the angst of having a dual identity in a place where the majority culture treats the minority so poorly. However, “the Turk of Cartel is not a foreigner; he belongs to Germany, although not to Germanness. Cartel focuses its discontent against the continuing dis-empowerment of Turkish and other diasporic communities, and against the label ‘guest-workers’ (Gastarbeiter) or ‘foreigners’, which serves to feed xenophobia... The ‘Turk’ in Cartel's music is an expression of the search for acknowledgment of Turkish political and social presence in German society not as foreign and transient, but as a constituent and permanent part of Germany" (Cinar, qtd. Soysant, 1999).

Olad Aden, a social worker for Gangway e.V. and organizer for Gangway Beatz Berlin, feels passionately that hip hop provides a venue for kids to express their emotions and to talk about their lives in a way that they wouldn't be able to otherwise. Aden comments that "Hip hop is a tool that you can use when you work with young kids, especially those who are uneducated and don’t attend school. It’s an accessible way for kids to talk about themselves and to open up, because they usually don't talk about their feelings." Gangway Beatz Berlin took kids from the streets of Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Neukölln, and provided them with six months of workshops on the history of hip hop, lyric writing and rapping. After these six months, the youth involved recorded and released a CD entitled “Gangway Beatz Berlin.” Unsurprisingly, the lyric workshops highlighted some hard realities of the youth involved. Continually recurring themes involved the conflicts some young people perceived between the German society in which they live and the traditional background of their parents or their community. This was particularly evident with some of the Arab girls involved in the program. "I worked with a group of Arab girls for 2 years,” Aden recalls, “and I knew nothing about them. It was very difficult to work with them because of resistance from their families, who often do not see why we should be working with them at all. They believe that the most important thing for these girls to focus on is cleaning the house and getting married. We got them involved in this project, and the first time we sat down with them to talk about this song, one of them was talking about already being promised to a guy in Turkey, and the other one was talking about taking the veil, and questioning why she needed to wear it. I've known them for two years and I didn't know any of this. In 20 minutes I learned all of this all because of this thing called rap."

In this example, it is clear that hip hop and conscious rap possess a significant role in helping to talk about identity, and also provide a platform in which to discuss the conditions and polarization that occurs in parallel societies. Being able to comment on political, social and economic conditions is an important way of participating in the discussion on how multiple cultures can live in peace and solidarity. Karl-Heinz Haase, director of Culture Rodeo, a subset of the social organization Kreuzberg Musikalische Aktion, took a similar approach to describe why Culture Rodeo used hip hop and rap to communicate with youth from migrant backgrounds. He commented that from a strictly pedagogical point of view, music was an effective venue to unite people from different backgrounds. Jochen König, a social worker at Cultures Interactive, agrees: music provides a space in which children can talk about their lives. Often, it reflects identity conflicts. Many Turkish children, in particular, reflect on conflicts at home between more traditional parents and the mainstream culture in the music they create.

A new pervasive element in Turkish-German hip hop is the introduction of gangsta rap. This is an import from the Western movement of gangsta rap, and is highly commercialized. Artists such as 50 Cent from the US and Germany's own Bushido are increasingly perpetuating a genre which often glorifies violence and the mistreatment of women. Naturally, this has infiltrated the Turkish-German hip hop scene in subject matter as well as with its musical style.

The conflict between gangsta rap and conscience rap or hip hop delves into a deeper issue of the purposes of this form of art in the minority context. Does gangsta rap truly reflect the reality of life as a person of migrant Turkish background in Germany, or is that merely what sells? Does this presentation of Turkish-German rappers as gansta rappers feed into the unsavory stereotypes in Germany that characterize Turkish youth as criminals? Does this matter? Erko, an emerging rapper of Turkish descent in Berlin, would say no. Rather than prescribing societal change or "combating" gangsta rap, he reflects his personal experiences and allows the listener to decide for themselves what to think. He believes that people should be allowed to make what they want to make. Moreover, he does not want to reinforce clichés in any context, whether it be "the Turkish person struggling with identity," or with gangsta rap. He feels exclusion in society as a person and as a rapper; he remarks that he wants to reflect his personal experiences—as a migrant, dealing with discrimination, and his views on life in general. He is an artist before anything and should not be put into any box.

Turkish-German Identity from the Perspective of Theater

While Turkish hip hop in Germany has a long history of addressing both personal experience and the social and economic problems associated with migrant identity, Turkish-German theater is only beginning to voice such topics. Many contemporary German theater ensembles include members of Turkish descent (Greve, Nur Orhan, 2008). In addition, there are many prominent theater directors in Germany possessing a migrant background, such as Shermin Langhoff of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Berlin. But for the last few decades, many of these artists sought to disassociate themselves from their migration background in an effort to promote an international, cosmopolitan image. As Langhoff would name it, a kind of “turkophobia” existed in Turkish theater.

This might seem surprising, since theatre is often political and socially progressive as a medium, providing apt means for documenting and mirroring personal experiences of migrants in Germany, and providing a critical approach to discussing clichés in society. Until recently, stereotypes dominated the image of migration and migrants’ experiences on stage. Consequently, actors of Turkish origin often received offers to play clichéd roles, such as the oppressed woman wearing a headscarf. In order to avoid being reduced to this flat stereotype and to maintain their artistic integrity, actors often refused a theatrical examination of their migration experiences.

A migrant theater scene has emerged only recently. With increased self-confidence, these migrants and post-migrants have launched a new generation of German theater, which tackles topics of migration or post-migration respectively, but in a way that avoids stereotypes. Instead, these artists intend to draw a transcultural, “classless” image of migrants without labels—an image of identity that reaches “beyond belonging,” in Langhoff’s words. They refuse to be defined solely by nationality, ethnic community, or socioeconomic status. Rather, this new generation of actors and directors strive to set up new perspectives and aesthetic approaches to migrant and post-migrant theater, says Tuncay Kulaoğlu, a journalist, filmmaker, translator, and co-founder of the Film festival Turkey/Germany in Nuremberg.

This new migrant theater is one offered predominantly in German; any theatre in the Turkish language is still quite rare in Germany. This is above all due to the fact that theater relies heavily on financing from the meager government funds provided for the cultural activities of migrants. The few theater performances and workshops in Turkish that receive government funding are socio-cultural projects with themes on parallel societies and social and cultural problems in Germany. These socio-cultural projects are widely accepted, and provide a vehicle for intercultural or even transcultural dialogue. They are predominantly directed by socio-cultural institutions with cooperation or assistance from professional artists, and many of the projects also involve non-professional actors.

Similar to hip hop projects, these theater projects provide their participants with tools to express their personal opinions and experiences. In contrast to political debates, however, theater participants are not forced to express their opinions directly, but may do so implicitly, “behind the mask of their role,” says Yilmaz Atmaca, an actor, theatre practitioner, director and scriptwriter. In Atmaca’s opinion, theater can go straight to the core of social problems present in German society, which are often labelled as “integration problems.” “Social-cultural problems are only solved through dialogue,” Atmaca comments, “by the way of a joint, peaceful and respectful coexistence. This is provided by means of theater.”

Turkish-German Perspective on Identity in the Visual Arts

What role do the visual arts play in the expression of Turkish-German identity in Berlin? The proliferation of contemporary Turkish art in Germany is a story that really began in Turkey, with the establishment of the prestigious International Istanbul Biennial in 1987 (Tannert, 10). The biannual exhibition continues to play a significant role in the promotion of artists of both Turkish and other national origins today, and was overseen by prominent German curator René Block in 1995 (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts). Institutions within Germany, such as Berlin’s Künstlerhaus Bethanien, have also played an important role in the exhibition of Turkish work in the past twenty years. The Künstlerhaus Bethanien, for example, has held exhibits such as “Hanefi Yeter, A Turkish Painter in Berlin,” “Germany in the Morning, Turkey in the Evening,” and “I Live in Germany; Seven Turkish Artists in Berlin” (“Berlin.Istanbul.Vice.Versa”).

Exhibitions addressing Turkish-German identity in art today portray not only the work of Turkish-German artists, but also visions of Germany’s changing and evolving communities from all sides, including the perspectives of Germans who have lived in Turkey and then returned to Germany.

Roland Stratmann, a German photographer and installation artist, participated in two significant 2004 exhibitions in Germany on Istanbul and the city’s relationship to Berlin, “Focus: Istanbul” and “Berlin. Istanbul. Vice.Versa,” both curated by Christoph Tannert. In the exhibition “Berlin. Istanbul. Vice Versa” Stratmann created an installation modelling the city of Istanbul. The artist based his model, however, on the memories and imaginations of children around Berlin, who wrote to him about their impressions of Istanbul. The children’s writings, Stratmann comments, often discussed being separated from their parents, with one living in Berlin and one in Istanbul, or their memories visiting Turkey on holidays. Some children with Turkish migrant backgrounds had never been to Turkey at all. Stratmann took these impressions of Istanbul and incorporated them into his installation piece of chicken wire and tinfoil, representing Istanbul as a type of “dream-like, imaginative” city for these children, injected with a different meaning for each individual based upon his or her own personal experience and background. The viewer would walk up to the piece, he remarked, “and look through it to the real landscape of Berlin out the window.” This piece illustrated that Istanbul, for some Turkish people living in Germany, lives only in their memories, summer holidays, or imaginations. And yet for many, it continues to be an integral part of their Turkish-German identity. The piece illustrated the duality of living physically in Germany, with Turkey’s enduring presence remaining a part of one’s metaphysical reality.

Many of the Turkish artists he knows, Stratmann comments, already feel “assimilated” in German society through their work as artists, and do not want to be isolated because of their national or ethnic background. “They already took part in all of these exhibitions [around the world],” the artist stated, “and didn’t want to be separated in any way, to be seen apart from other artists.” Turkish artists are well-represented in international exhibitions, the artist commented, from Turkey to Germany to Poland. This might explain his perception that there was resistance exhibited by some Turkish artists to the idea of an exhibition such as “Focus: Istanbul,” which concentrated solely on a Turkish city, thereby differentiating these artists by their national origins or migrant background.

When Curator Christoph Tannert reflected on the Turkish-German art culture in Berlin he remarked, "art history can't be written in a globalized view, but permanently on a sole artist’s point of view. If you're not asking how an artist feels themselves, you would be wrong. However, most German-Turkish artists are not a nation first. I am not sure I understand this... They are more artists than a part of a nation. This is what art can offer the world—how to live in between. That's what artists here can bring." Still, Tannert believes that the identity crisis occurring in Germany for many Germans of Turkish migrant background is reflected in their artwork. Even Turkish artists who live as cosmopolitans feel these identity struggles. For some, there is a reluctance to engage in dialogue about Turkey or Turkish issues while living abroad due to a wish to remain patriotic to Turkey.

Turkish-German Perspectives on Identity in Film

Questions of Turkish-German identity were perhaps first addressed in film. Shermin Langhoff, director of the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, commented that “there would be no Hollywood without migration, and no European art cinema the way it exists today without immigration.” Such a sentiment also holds true for German cinema. A number of movies produced in the 1990’s raised new perspectives on questions of identity, such as “Geschwister” by Thomas Arslan, “36m² Stoff” by Neco Çelik, or “Kurz und schmerzlos” by Fatih Akin (Greve, Nur Orhan, 2008). The defining breakthrough for film directors of Turkish descent came with the Golden Bear awarded for Fatih Akin’s “Head-On” (“Gegen die Wand”) in 2004. Akin tells the story of the punk rocker Cahit and Sibel, a suicidal woman oppressed by her traditional Turkish parents, who enter into a marriage of convenience. The movie gained critical applause for its engaging storyline and the modern way in which it dealt with people of Turkish descent living in Germany.

Even if German-Turkish film is increasingly accepted in mainstream society today, the expression of identity in cinema is still determined by economic factors. It is rarely possible to show a movie in the Turkish language with German subtitles, and even the topics addressed in such films are greatly determined by the film distribution economy. This is why Masayo Kajimura, video artist, filmmaker and curator, conceived the film series “Made in Germany,” shown in the Werkstatt der Kulturen in Berlin. She presents the work of filmmakers from diverse backgrounds who all grew up in Germany, and whose films address topics extending migration, such as the film “Folge der Feder”, by Turkish-born Nuray Sahin. “Many excellent movies don’t make it to the cinema,” she states, “since film distributors consider them to be too complex.” Tuncay Kulaoğlu, co-founder and curator of the “Film festival Turkey/Germany” in Nuremberg, shares her disapproval. “In the sector of movies, there are only two or three well-known films by Turkish-Germans that do not tackle issues of migration. The homogeneity of the ‘migrant’ movie scene is a superficial one.”

For Nesrin Soycetin, organizer of the “Turkish Film Week” in Berlin, art in the form of film can serve to bridge divides between Turkey and Germany. Film can facilitate a dialogue which can bring the two nations and their diaspora communities closer together. When reflecting on why film is so interesting for her, Soycetin remembers seeing one particular movie with her family and neighbors when she was twelve years old, a family drama about a man who had to kill his sister, who worked as a prostitute, in order to cleanse the family tree. At the end of the movie, she recalls, everyone was crying, including the men. She saw, even then, the power of film to transcend cultural taboos, such as men crying, and to open up questions of identity through the utilization of the symbolism of prostitution as a representation of lost tradition or lost identity.

Since then, she has seen this identity crisis mirrored in Turkey and among the diaspora community in Germany. It has been exacerbated in German society by the stereotyping of the Turkish person as a criminal migrant, but also by the media's obsession with the debate on admitting Turkey to the European Union. As Soycetin herself says, "I am German and Turkish—I have a double identity, but Germans don't want to hear this." Soycetin wants the Turkish film week in Berlin to increase consciousness about social issues, and to facilitate a dialogue about the two cultures and two countries that will hopefully bring them to a better understanding of each other and their respective migrants. Soycetin sees the development of a European aesthetic in Turkish-German cinema, reflecting the influence of living in Germany on the work of these filmmakers, and believes this is a necessary step to communicating with the German audience. She is a firm believer that “Turkish cinema in Germany can be a platform for intellectuals to speak in an artistic way, so that people can listen in whatever form they want, even a love story, about social issues.” Although the “Turkish Film Week” has not received the attention it deserves in the German media, Soycetin believes that it is an amazing opportunity for German society to ask questions directly to the producers of these films, such as "Why do some Turkish people kill their sisters?", to further a greater understanding of the Turkish culture. "A film can't maybe solve everything,” she says, “but it can show you the problem. The message ‘We can have a better future’ is implicit in your thoughts after the film.”

Filmmaker Sükriye Dönmez, frustrated with the stereotyped roles she was continually assigned to as a Turkish actress in Germany, decided to begin producing her own short films to challenge these stereotypes. She chooses to incorporate very little dialogue into her work, so that her films are able to reach as broad and international an audience as possible. Dönmez notes that a new type of post-9/11 racism against Turkish people now exists in Germany, and the response of many Turkish people to continue wearing headscarves or other symbols of their culture and their faith has become a new display of Turkish identity and solidarity within Germany. Her films play with these stereotypes, of both the conservative Turkish woman kept in the home wearing the headscarf, and the fully modern, “assimilated” Turk, using humor and parody. Humor, Dönmez states, is a powerful tool that “can make peace between people.” Her films focus on everyday experiences and often use non-professional actors from local areas in Berlin such as Kreuzberg. A sense of an identity crisis among both Turkish-Germans and majority society in Germany still exists, she notes, but she firmly believes that the two cultures need each other and can glean valuable insight from each other. Dönmez believes that people need to have their eyes opened to what they think so that they can have better communication. More than anything, she thinks film can facilitate this.

And the Moral of the Story Is…

The artists interviewed, social organizations investigated, and artistic works viewed during this research process have all pointed to dialogue and self-expression as the end goals for artistic endeavors wrestling with Turkish-German identity. Clearly there is never one way to be Turkish, to be German, or to be Turkish-German. One sentiment many Turkish-German artists, musicians, actors, and filmmakers interviewed for this paper repeated over and over was the wish to move to a type of “post-migration” work, to personal expressions that were less about portraying identity as restricted or reduced to immigrant background, and more about creating cultural expressions shaped by individual experience. Art is one way to provide a platform that explores identity and personal expression through expanding one’s perception of the world, rather than closing it down through labels, boundaries, and stereotypes. The state of Turkish-German artistic expression today points to efforts to engage all types of audiences with messages that push firmly past these stereotypes.

However, before you lay this article down and think “Well, that’s nice but art doesn’t solve anything,” think again. Art gives people free access to express emotion without the trappings of political compromise or limited platforms. Art opens people up to think about issues in a way politics or debate never can. Art has the propensity to reflect society without immediately throwing up walls. As Sükriye Dönmez stated, “Humor opens people up, and that’s what my art tries to do.” The only way to truly allow for Turkish and German communities to live as equals and, perhaps, to live as one community, is to provide a space for open and honest dialogue. Art can provide the most powerful, realistic, and personal means of creating those open spaces.